Everywhere you browse, people have such strong opinions about everything and are so toxic or extremely negative. You start playing a game, want to check the forums or something and most of the posts are people being mean to each other. You open social media to keep in touch with people that you’d like to maintain a certain level of contact and there’s always some people that are always complaining about every single thing.

I see myself more and more closing myself into a bubble which makes me appreciate Beehaw much more. I know I am guilty of being taken away by the toxicity and sometimes replying things I wouldn’t be proud of but since I joined Beehaw I see myself policing myself more and more focused on being better.

Just a quick rant, I currently started playing Baldur’s Gate 3 and I am honestly pissed off on the fact people can’t give feedback without being rude or “gamers” just shitting on developers because they are stans of another game. I wanted to be active on the forum and comment on bugs and such because I want the game to be better but it is so depressing reading people being awful so often.

Why are we so shitty to each other? I’m so tired.

Edit: Pardon me if I used weird terms or grammar errors, english isn’t my first language

Edit2: removed specifics

  • raccoona_nongrata@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    I think we’re still, unfortunately, living in the fallout of things like Gamergate, where bad actors realized they could train people in a lot of subtle kinds of dog whistling and forms of bad faith interaction. We’re all unfortunately victims of a war to claim internet culture for the far right.

    Steve Bannon was one of the earliest people to realize he could weaponize “Gamers” to try and influence the nature of discourse on the Internet, that’s sort of what Gamergate was all about; testing the waters for how young men could be converted into toxic edgelords and then essentially let loose.

    The effectiveness comes with the fact that it’s a self-sustaining kind of behavior – once you equip someone with with toxic rhetorical tools and then reinforce the validity of that kind of thinking using insulated communities as sort of incubators, it just keeps spreading until being hostile and aggressive is normalized as the first response to anything. So much so that even people charged with moderating communities will hesitate to address it in direct way, instead operating under the philosophy “This is just the way things are, you can’t ban everyone”.

    If you ever have the time and inclination, Innuendo Studios did a really insightful long-form analysis of the origins and tactics around Gamergate, and once you hear someone articulate it all and put it in a historic context it really helps clarify why, as you say, the Internet has seemed to becoming increasingly toxic as a default. It’s not all a direct result of Gamergate, but those events encapsulate so many concepts that are relevant even today, GG helped field test many of the crappy tactics we see online today, and then giant social media algorithms realized they could generate clicks by promoting that rage culture.

    • cubedsteaks@lemmy.today
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      1 year ago

      I started using 4chan around 2007/2008. It was always like that. It was the place to be if you were a toxic edgelord - a space to openly be a nazi and racist and homophobic.

      I remember threads on /b/ back then too where people were looking for a new Hitler.

      And they always had that shitty mentality. Be as contrarian as you can and as long as you can antagonize people into reacting, then you got one over on someone.

      I haven’t been on there since 2020 but I watched it get worse and worse over the years as it spread into the mainstream with things like Gamergate and the fappening. I even tried to tell people but they would just laugh it off cause “4chan”